Still, when I think of my father's work it's the grocer's constant, often monoto- nous routines that come to mind: the predawn trips to the city market; the six-day weeks; the regular inventories that ended wIth both of my parents sit- ting at the breakfast-room table operat- ing adding machines; the mystery cans that had lost their labels and therefore found their way to our larder; the impre- cations against the chain stores that were trying to put independent grocers out of business. Several years ago, in an article that dealt partly with a man in Milwaukee who was for a time a second-generation grocer, I wrote, "The grocery business is notorious for em- bodying just about every headache that exists in retail trade-dreadful hours that culminate in Saturday's being the busiest day of the week, endemic labor problems, spoilage. In the grocery business, it's accepted that one measure of a man's success is raising a son with enough sense to go into another line of work." I must have been thinking of my father as well as of the man in Milwaukee, al- though I don't recall my father's having any labor problems beyond the contre- temps that were presumably behind his theory-one of his absolute theories, leaving no room for exceptions-that a deep streak of insanity ran through people who earned their livings as butchers. "Harold doesn't " seem crazy to me, I remember telling him once about a butcher I liked. The answer was the same as when I pointed out a cou- sin of my mother's who did not ap- pear to have any sort of nelVOUS tic: "It just hasn't shown " up yet. My father was himself a second- generation gro- cer-his father, who died before I was born, had run a little grocery store in St. Joe- and he definitely thought of himself as someone with enough sense to go into another line of work. Patching together memories of vague references, I think that at some point between the time he graduated from high school and the time he moved to Kansas City he may have been involved in an unsuccess- ful business venture in St. Joe. For what- ever reason, going into a small business that he was already familiar with appar- ently became the only option that seemed viable. Particularly in those early days, when my father was trying to make a living from a tiny store on the edge of down- town Kansas City during the Depression, my mother worked alongside him, which made her a second-generation grocer herself. She often said that she had grown up in a grocery store. I have a pho- tograph of her, as a teen-ager, standing solemnly with her parents in one of those old-fashioned stores which displayed cans and boxes in perfect pyramids. In the last years of her life, when she finally agreed that hiring a private aide at the nursing home was a worthwhile way to spend money she had worked hard for, the phrase she used to justifY her decision was "Otherwise, why did I sack all those onions?" Eventually, my father owned five gro- cery stores, almost anyone of which would fit into, say, the dairy department of a modern Kansas City supermarket. 59 Having five stores, each supposedly with its own manager, did not reduce his hours. It made for even more butchers. My mother still filled in often at the checkout counter, usually at the newest and largest store, which carried the mod- ern name ofTrillin's Super Market. It was a point of pride with her that she was the fastest checkout person my father had available. (Both she and my father, prod- ucts of the era when grocers totted the bill on the back of a paper sack rather than at a checkout cash register, could add a column of numbers so quickly that it might have qualified as a parlor trick if most of the other people in the parlor hadn't themselves been grocers.) Even with five stores, my father got up at four in the morning six days a week to go to the city market for his produce. When people he met heard of this schedule, they almost always said to him some- thing like 'Well, I suppose you get used to it after a while, don't you?" and he always said "No." At some point, my mother began reminding him that other grocers truly managed all right by send- ing someone else to the market, or even by ordering over the phone. TryIng to persuade him of that, she said, was "like talking to the wall." It was a given in our family that my fa- ther was a grocer so that I wouldn't have to be. He hated it. When he began, he .. fJ'\ ,,- - (.- V Xktj "The garden is my résumé. "